But the reality is that the price increase is obviously way overdue. It should have occurred YEARS ago as several small increases over time. Those of us that have bought Vans products in the last couple of years got a DISCOUNT on those products without us (or Vans) realizing it. It's not unfair that the prices are rising to where they necessarily should be - it's just reality, and past due.
This has been my thinking for a while. In retrospect, it should have been a warning sign that Van's *wasn't* increasing prices faster than they were, because prices in general rose faster than the increases that they did pass along.
The fact is that people who bought kits in the last 3 years or so have experienced a boon relative to what they would have paid if Van's had had an adequate accounting system. Had Van's management fully understood the situation, they presumably would have raised prices to compensate, and kit buyers in the last several years would have been paying significantly more than they have actually paid.
The fact that this is happening in one big lump under stressful and difficult circumstances is annoying, and bad for business, but should have been predictable. The lack of a good accounting system and controls within Van's does not, however serve as an excuse for the situation, but highlights the management failures even more.
Additionally, based on a really rough overview of the comments on these threads, it appears to me that the bulk of negative comments come from a relatively large number of commenters who have small post counts. For whatever reason, these folks have not been discussing their builds here. This is a significant event for new builders, and if you look at post counts and make the assumption that they correlate with builder experience and time, you can see that a large number of new Van's customers have been introduced to this hobby and this company in an unpleasant way. This could reverberate througout the kit aircraft industry for a while, just based on word of mouth from new builders who have made their first purchases from Van's, a company that was widely regarded as the safest bet for new and inexperienced builders for years.
Though I started my project in 2016 and am still working on it, I purchased the bulk of my kits well before 2020, and have experienced the time slippage and price increase mainly in my finishing kit, which I took delivery of only after a 14 month wait, and which still has significantly costly parts backordered. But this has to be hitting newer builders even harder.
All that said, I think Van's has a good plan to make a solid recovery. While the cost of building an RV in the future will be significantly higher than it has been in the past, and they will suffer an inevitable slump in business due to reputational damage, they will likely survive, and the RV hobby will continue.
I, for one, look forward to finishing my RV-10, and probably building an RV-8 some day.